Cray is world's fastest supercomputer

Cray's Titan supercomputer has snatched the title of world's fastest from the National Nuclear Security Administration's Sequoia.

Titan has 18,688 nodes, each of which contains an AMD 16-core Opteron and a NVIDIA Tesla K20X GPU accelerator. Its 560,640 processors, which are capable of 17.59 quadrillion operations per second. Sequoia, which is the number two, snatched the top spot back in June with 16.32 quadrillion.

Titan is housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where it's used to perform calculations for nuclear energy research, and analysis of techniques which can make combustion engines more efficient. It also does a spot of climate modelling on the side. It is part of a new breed of big iron which mixes GPU number crunching with traditional chips.